


The Christmas Chronicles: Saving Santa

by Tabata



Series: Leoverse [70]
Category: Glee
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-01-31
Updated: 2016-01-31
Packaged: 2018-05-17 10:22:22
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 13,184
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5865751
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Tabata/pseuds/Tabata
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>WARNING: This story is an AU from the original 'verse. What happens in here has little to none correlation with what happens in Leonard Karofsky-Hummel VS The world or Broken Heart Syndrome. The characters involved are (mostly) the same, but situations and relationships between them may be completely different.<br/>This particular verse is not that complicated to explain. Basically, Blaine is Santa Claus - yes, that Santa Claus - and the boys are his elves. A couple of days before Christmas, Blaine goes missing during a test flight. So, Leo and Cody leave the North Pole to search for him in the real world, where they meet Adam, a boy they used to know and that stopped writing his letters to Santa a long time ago. Everything you know about Christmas is wrong, and we're gonna explain you why.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Christmas Chronicles: Saving Santa

**Author's Note:**

> New year, new verse! (we have tons of them ready for you, anyway)  
> Actually, I wrote this story as a Christams present for [Liz](http://archiveofourown.org/users/lisachan/pseuds/lisachan), but I'm lazy and I'm only posting it now (also, I needed to since Liz is writing the sequel). Anyway, I hope you enjoy sexy Santa and a whole team of sexy elves.

“Temperature.”

“About 187F°, sir.”

Matt looks at the central screen that shows a blueprint of the two reactors, one of them slightly more red than the other. “They are unbalanced,” he says. “Hold the first, boost the second. We need them both at 190.”

The whole room seems to buzz and beep. The headset sizzles for a moment, before the voice comes through. “Are we good?” It's distant, breaking every now and then.

Matt sighs. “Hardly. And the reception sucks,” he answers. “Too much wind. You sure ya wanna be doin' this today?”

A laugh crackles in Matt's ears. “I've been doing this on this exact day for the past five hundred years. I'm not gonna change now because it's a little windy.”

“You know the checkpoints are approximate, right?” Matt insists, giving the thumbs up to one of the technicians showing him a little chalkboard with something written on it. “They're just guidelines. We can put off the testing for a few days. We still have time.”

“Never put off anything in my life,” the voice comes again. It's amused, yet stubborn.

Matt presses a couple of buttons on the dashboard, then moves along to check another screen from behind the shoulders of another technician. “He didn't agree on this,” Matt continues, speaking in the headset. He taps the screen to indicate something. The technician nods and proceeds to fix the problem. “I think his exact words were _The hell we're freakin' doin' this tomorrow_.”

The voice laughs. “He gets so worked up all the time.”

“But he's not wrong, y'know,” Matt insists, leaving his virtual signature on a series of tablets offered to him one after the other by several people. “There are some major issues. And I still miss his authorization. Technically, me letting ya fly today is a protocol's violation.”

“I run the house,” the voice reminds him, “I'm the protocol. Leave the consequences to me.”

“Roger that,” Matt sighs. He knew that speaking up was going to be pointless, but he had to at least try. Now that he's been relieved from the task of cleaning all the shit that's gonna hit the fan after the launch – specifically when _he_ 'll know about this – he can go on with his life.

“Reactors' temperature stabilized,” a technician says. “190 F°.”

Matt checks the reactors' screen and now both reactors are the same shade of red and the same temperature. “Flaps?”

“Working.”

“Lights?”

“Working,” another technician answers.

“Fuel,” Matt continues.

Yet another technician backs off from his station and takes off his headset, turning directly to Matt. “We had a 0,05% decrease from the last time we checked,” he informs him. “It might be a leak.”

Matt speaks into his headset. “Boss, did you hear that?”

The radio sizzles again. The voice comes and goes a couple of times. “The tech on this thing doesn't even read a difference like that,” he says. “And it's just a test flight. I'm gonna be fine. Just let me go before he wakes up.”

“Fine,” Matt sighs. He raises a hand, drawing attention to himself. “Gimme runway 14 on the screens.”

The combined monitors – at least fifty, covering the entire wall in front of him – all flicker at once, and then show the world outside. A very windy, very snowy world. Only part of the runway can be seen beyond the hood of the vehicle. The red lines on the ground that should be guiding the driver disappear into a white nothing after ten feet. “This is madness,” Matt murmurs, shaking his head.

The voice of the man comes across breaking even more than before. The only difference now is that Matt can actually see him on the screen, a vaguely red, indistinct form in the cockpit. “Tower, are we ready?”

Matt sighs again. He's been doing more sighing in the past few minutes than in the whole year. “Engines,” he calls. He sees the back of the vehicle lighting up. There's half a second delay in the second engine. One of the technician signals it to him, but he can't do anything about it. The whole vehicle is shaking in front of his eyes, like it's about to explode. “I can see the vibrations from here,” he says in the headset.

“It's fine,” the man on the other side says. “It's an old model. The shaking is included.”

Matt would rather not respond to that. “Ready in ten, nine...”  
Everybody in the room holds their breath. They've been running test throughout the whole year, and not one of them gave good results. But there's so much you can do as a technician when your boss decides to ignore the certainty of failure.

“...eight, seven, six...”  
This is not exactly Matt's Job. It has been his job for a while back in the days, and he certainly learned how to do it in case it's needed – when you run a factory this big with only a few managers and an army of non-specialized workers, you _want_ your managers to know everything –, but his real job is in the Manufacturing Department. He is not supposed to be at this dashboard right now.

“...five, four, three...”  
The whole estate is not _that_ big. People think that this kind of mass-production needs a factory fitting the numbers, but they have their systems exactly to avoid that. The estate is actually no more than five hundreds acres, and it's organized in four concentric circles, growing smaller the closer they are to the center. A little bit like London, if you want. The outer circle is for protection: high walls, barbed wire, turrets and military defense tactics. People think that a place like this in the middle of the snowy nowhere has no enemy and doesn't need to be defended. But they are wrong.

The third circle is for animals. They've got proper stables and pastures and all that jazz. Half of the space is for their animals, the other half is for those they have to deliver. It's a pretty noisy place sometimes, and it doesn't exactly smell of flowers. Except for the people working in there – very dedicated, animal-loving people – nobody ever wants to stay there longer than it's needed.

The second circle is for the actual factory, and that would surprise people, if they knew. The second circle is smaller, they would say, how can the factory be in it? It's actually logical, if you think about it. Animals need more space than warehouses. Especially with their system. Always the system.

The fourth most inner circle is for living quarters. And it's big enough, considering there are not many of them – them being the boss and the managers. Anyway, they're not really quarters, it's more like a single house. A very big one with a lot of space. Boss likes to keep them close.

“...two, one, zero. Liftoff.”  
The whole estate is not that big. And the distance between the house and the factory is even smaller. So, it would take someone approximately five minutes to get from the house to the control tower. Supposing that said person had left the house at the beginning of the radio conversation, they would arrive at the control tower as the same exact moment as the vehicle leaving the ground, which means now. When the door opens, Matt sighs. At least, he thinks, the deed is done.

“What's going on here?”

The whole room falls quiet. A little army of fifty tiny technicians in their green coats take a step back, the echo of tinkling bells ending way after they stop moving. Only Matt remains behind the dashboard, not more fazed by the entrance than he would be by chocolate milk for breakfast. He's rarely shaken by anything. He's very tall – too tall, actually, there have been some concerns about his true nature for a while – and very thin, so his back is slightly curved, like a reed in the wind. His black hair are long and unruly, barely contained by the over-size beret, and his black eyes look sleepy, but this is not an indication of anything because, as far as everybody who knows him is concerned, Matt was born looking sleepy. “Dude, listen...”

“Don't _dude_ me, Matt. Just answer the question.” The new arrival is a boy, looking seventeen but probably much older than that like anybody else in this place. He too is tall with black hair, but his graceful features, and blue, almond-shaped eyes are way more typical for his race. His name is Leo.

Matt knows that beating around the bush is pointless just as trying to explain, because in either case Leo is not gonna listen. He never does. “He wanted to make a test flight,” Matt says.

“A test was not authorized,” Leo says. And then he specifies, “I didn't authorize anything.”

“He authorized himself.”

“Which he cannot do,” Leo points out. “We have rules and a protocol for a reason.”

“He said he is the protocol.”

“Well, he also says he's the King of the World when he's drunk, but it's not necessarily true,” Leo says, approaching the dashboard. “Move away, will you?” He shoos one of the technicians away from a computer station and sits down in his place. The little creature steps away, grumbling about mobbing.

Leo types in a series of numbers. The view on the screen changes again, showing a world map filled of thousands of red blinking lights. He types in again in the computer and the lights disappear, showing the same world map but divided into quadrants. Leo moves on the wheeled office chair to the other side of the dashboard and types in some more. A portion of the screen – Australia, to be precise – disappears to leave room for what looks like the feed of a CCTV camera. The image is dark and a bit grainy, but they can clearly see the cockpit and the man inside of him.

“I didn't know we could do that!” Matt says, shocked.

“Of course you didn't. This is not your workstation, it's mine,” Leo says, grabbing another headset and placing it on his head. “Blaine, can you hear me?”

“Hello, Sunshine,” Blaine chirps, smiling at the camera. He's a dashing man of forty-something, with black curly hair and a charming smile. He doesn't seem worried at all.

“Oh, don't even start,” Leo growls, apparently immune to Blaine's charms. “You're not gonna flirt your way out of this. Where are you?”

Blaine chuckles, his hands holding a pair of leather reins. “I've just left Alaska, love. Everything's fine,” he says. “I count on being past the equator in less than ten minutes. I might even stop in Brazil for a capirinha.”

“No, what you're gonna do is turn around and come back before that thing you're driving falls apart.”

“This thing, as you call it, is perfectly fine. It's responding very well,” Blaine says. “As per usual, you're being dramatic.”

“That sleigh hasn't been inspected in months, and it was among those I was planning to retire,” Leo continues, watching him through the screen.

“This beauty has been with me since the beginning.”

“That is why we need to stop using it!” Leo exclaims, flailing his arms. A couple of technicians run away, scared. They were all there during the Great Drama of Christmas 2010. Nobody feels safe around Leo's flailing hands anymore.

“Are you saying that you should stop using me too? I'm as old as it is, after all.”

“Luckily for everybody involved, you are inspected every two days to say the least,” Leo says, miraculously maintaining his composure, despite the innuendos. “Now, please, before I get really mad, turn around and come back. Test flight is over.”

Blaine is definitely about to say something. Blaine always knows the right thing to say – no matter if he's right or not, he will convince you that he is – and never fails to say it. Besides, Leo can see his mouth opening already on the screen. But the words never come, and the video disappears too. They can only see the sleigh swing dangerously, and then the camera feed is gone. 

“Blaine?” Leo asks tentatively. The headset gives back only static.

Matt gets closer to him as the whole room starts buzzing again. All the little technicians run back to their stations, instantly smashing buttons and typing in on their keyboards. “What's going on?” He asks.

“We lost connection,” Leo says, without turning to him. His fingers move incredibly fast on the keyboard. Symbols, numbers and letters are scrolling down continuously on his computer screen. This is a code Matt can't understand.

“It was him?”

“No, something went wrong,” Leo says. And then, still busy with his computer, he screams at the technicians. “I want that connection back.”

“The sleigh's computer is not responding, sir.”

Leo growls something unintelligible and opens a series of programs. “Where is he?” He barks. “Give me his position!”

One of the technician turns to him, hesitantly. “Sir, the computer...”

“Hijack the freaking GPS!” Leo thunders. Everybody instantly gets to work. 

Matt places ha hand on his shoulder. “Calm down, bro.”

“I am calm, Matt.” Leo takes a deep breath, but the dark shade in his eyes tells everybody that he's not. “How long for that GPS?”

“The GPS doesn't respond either,” a bold technician explains, despite Leo's burning look. “It must have broken. I could only retrieve a partial route.”

He sends it to the main screens before Leo can ask him to. The screens are still showing the map of the world, and suddenly a red line is being drawn from the North Pole to North America. “The last data show him above Ohio, sir.”

“He said he was going to pass the equator in about ten minutes,” Matt says. “Considering the speed he was going at, it makes sense.”

Leo nods vaguely as he watches the map in front of his eyes. Not that it can tell him more than the GPS has already done, but he can't look away. Even with engines able to bend the law of space an time, and a good dose of _magic_ , so to speak, the world seems impossibly big when he doesn't know where Blaine is.

That sleigh has been having problems throughout the year.

Actually, the whole plant has been having problems throughout the year. The factory has been a big collection of mechanical failures, breakdowns, leaks and occasional computer uprisings. But has anybody listened to him when the paint nozzles in the painting department started spray painting green what should have been blue, black what should have been pink, and very precise Pollack's reproductions on every single fabric item that went through the machine? No, of course. Has anybody listened to him when he warned them that the cinnamon levels in the candy machine was too high? No, of course. Has anybody listened to him when he reminded everybody that every single mean of transportation in the household needed a revision? And again, no. He's only the Head Manager, after all. Why should anybody listen to him?

And now this. He can't be held responsible. Except that he feels responsible, so it doesn't matter if he's being held as such or not by the others. This place is a mess. The boss is now M.I.A. The bloody Christmas – even they are allowed to curse if the situation requires it – risks to be canceled. Could it be any worse than that?

*

The factory has a Situation Room like the White House. Except that, being in the factory, it's more like a cozy living room. Every room in the factory looks a lot like a cozy living room or a cozy kitchen or, in the case of the third circle of the estate, a cozy yard. In the land of perpetual Christmas a certain style in interior design is majorly unavoidable. The room has two windows, both with red little curtains and both facing a snowy landscape. You can see a snowman from one and two huge (edible) candy canes – courtesy of the Candy Department – from the other. There's a big fireplace, and it's programmed to self-light up every time someone is using the room, like all the fireplaces of the estate. The mantlepiece here is decorated with mistletoe and red, shiny Christmas balls. It would be sober and elegant, if it wasn't for the gigantic portrait of Blaine hanging on the wall above it. The man is wearing is typical red outfit and he looks smug. It's one of his pictures they didn't _casually_ leak to the outside world in the course of the centuries. The outside world needs a chubby, jolly, old fella more than it needs a cocky, handsome man. For some reasons Leo can't quite understand, it's more suitable in everybody's imaginary to have the former deal with children.  
At the center of the room there's an oak rounded table, whose equality purpose is completely nullified by Blaine's honest-to-God throne, an abomination in red painted wood, now empty. At the center of the table there's a vast selection of cakes and sweets, and enough mugs of hot chocolate for everybody.

Leo is standing next to the fireplace, his arms crossed to his chest, a worried expression on his face. He watches as the other managers enters the room and take their place around the table. They're all obviously confused to have been summoned in the Situation Room without so much as an explanation. The note they received just said it was urgent – there wasn't much time for anything else, and nobody was gonna read it anyway. Nobody ever does.

“Leo, was this really necessary?” Matt asks, stretching his long legs under the table.

“Most importantly, is there really a good reason why I'm here when I should be patrolling the perimeter of this place?” Casey asks, annoyed. He's the only one in the room wearing white and gray mimetic pants, and his beret is more like a beanie. Plus, he's armed, which is pretty much the only case in the whole estate. “Trolls are on the hunt in this time of year.”

“It's not a good reason,” Leo frowns at him. “It's _the only_ good reason you should be here, and you shouldn't be happy about it.”

Jesse sighs, passing a hand over his face in a failed attempt at bearing with Leo's way of reporting any news. From volcanic eruptions to missing toilet paper in the bathrooms, everything takes ages to be said. “Cut the drama, Leo. What's going on?”

“During an unauthorized test flight,” Leo doesn't forget to glare at Matt, “we lost contact with Blaine, whose whereabouts are currently unknown.”

For a very long moment the room falls silent. Nobody dares to speak.  
They look at each other, trying to see if someone is going to say anything first. That's the time it takes for the news to sink in, then everybody starts to talk at once, asking questions, proposing courses of actions, blaming everything and everyone that can be blamed.

Leo puts two fingers in his mouth and whistles so loudly that everybody frowns and covers their ears. The room falls silent again. “Thank you,” Leo says sarcastically. “If you could just shut up and listen, instead of blabbing nonsense, that would be great.”

“How is this even possible?” Annie asks, her red hair sparkling under her red beret. “How did we lose connection with him?”

“We don't know yet,” Leo answers. “Possibly, a radio malfunction. The sleigh was an old model.”

“And why did he take it?” Casey asks.

“Because he's an idiot, I would say. The sleigh was already filed for dismantle,” Leo explains, “but he thought otherwise.”

“And what about his personal communicator?” Cody asks, blinking his big blue eyes. “He always has it on himself.”

“He's got it,” Leo says, nodding seriously. This seems to reassure Cody and everybody else, but their relief only lasts a few moment. “But it's not responding as it should. The feedback is corrupted. Either the device is broken or there's some kind of interference. As of now, we can't say if he can hear us or if he's trying to communicate with us.”

The room starts buzzing again. Everybody is murmuring something to themselves or someone else. They're all visibly shocked. They are all too young to have experienced something like this before. Blaine has always been in the estate or they have always known where to find him. Christmas itself has never been in real danger. Unluckily, Leo has seen it happen twice already, and both were terrible times. He also checked the records and he knows that it happened several times before his own time. Apparently, Blaine has a history of disappearing, ignoring rules, making his managers crazy.

Leo lets them all quite down on their own this time and then clears his throat. “Some security measures are already in place,” he explains carefully. “But the technicians tell me that there seems to be no way to contact him and ascertain the situation remotely. In this very moment they're trying to hijack the sleigh's computer to get more information. After that, someone's gonna go there and extract him.”

Casey sits straight in his chair. “Well, it seems to me that the most logic thing to do is that I'm the one to go,” he says. “I can have a team ready in twenty minutes.”

Leo was expecting that. “It is the most logic, but it is against the rules,” he says. “You know that very few of you are allowed to cross the borders.”

“I'm the most qualified.”

“But you're among those who are literally prevented by magic to take a step out of Blaine's land,” Leo insists. “And there's a good reason for that. You know how it goes: _No magical creature can't enter the human world under any circumstances if not previously licensed to do so by the highest referral authority. All transgressor will be..._ ”

“ _...immediately neutralized._ I know. But you're the highest authority now, you can lift the ban.”

“That's not how it works. As long as Blaine is alive, and I have to assume that he is, then he's the highest authority.”

These rules were set in place a long time ago and for a good reason. The human world is a dangerous place for magical creatures, and humans – not all of them at least – are not mentally ready to accept and deal with the existence of beings able to do what would be perceived as _magic_. Something had to be done. So Blaine – or someone else, Leo is not sure about this – decided that the Land of Christmas would be isolated inside a bubble. No humans can enter it and no magical creature can leave it. Everybody is safe.

“But he's unable to act as such,” Casey insists. “There must be an override rule or something like that.”

Leo shakes his head. “There's nothing I can do about it,” he says with a sigh. “Plus, you said it yourself. It's trolls season, you can't just go and leave this place unguarded. Last time you left your lieutenant to do your job we lost three hundreds reindeer and we had to rebuild an entire department.”

“Fine, then what do you propose?” Casey asks. 

“I'll go,” Leo answers. 

Matt frowns. “The heck you're going alone!” He says, worried. “It's too dangerous. I'm coming with you.”

“I've been out there on Christmas night every year for the past two centuries, I can handle myself,” Leo answers. There's no trace of him being offended in his voice because he knows Matt is only worried for him. “Besides, I need someone to stay here and coordinate the others. You're the only one who knows at least something of every department.”

Matt shakes his head. “Fine, but you're not going alone,” he insists, making it clear that if it's not him, it must be someone else.

“I can go with you.”

Everybody turns around at the sound of Cody's sweet voice. They all look at him and he blushes furiously, unconsciously trying to hide behind his mug of hot chocolate. Despite being Casey's twin, Cody is very different from his brother. Whereas Casey's got a mostly aggressive attitude, Cody is always sweet and shy. Even his mild expression makes his face rounded while Casey's face is all angles and straight lines. There's a reason why Casey is head of security and Cody's head of the Candy Department.

“No, you cannot,” Casey says.

Leo is torn. He doesn't like Casey very much and he's always happy when he can disagree with him, but this time he can't really say he's wrong. Plus, if there's anyone in the estate that wants to protect Cody from everything, it's Leo. Casey beats him at that only because he wants to protect his twin from Leo too. “Cody, I appreciate the offer, but...”

“I've been studying to be an helper for the past two years and I passed the test with flying colors. I know how to deal with the human world. And Blaine lift my ban last month,” Cody explains, calmly. “I'm fully licensed.”

Cody gives Leo a meaningful look. A look Leo can easily read because they were together when Leo told him that it would have been nice to work together every now and then. And that's what prompted Cody to become an helper on Christmas Night aside of his main job at the factory. Basically, Leo brought this upon himself.

“And what about your department?” Leo asks, trying his last option. “Production can't stop.”

“The main production is already started and the technicians can take care of the assembly line. The only thing missing are the perishable, but I can't start to produce them until Christmas Eve . Blaine's orders.”

Leo can feel Casey's eyes on himself, and it's those eyes more than Matt's worried face that makes him decide. “Alright, we're going together,” he announces. “Be ready, we're leaving in ten. All the others, please don't blow the estate up while I'm away.”

The managers slowly leave the room, some are talking among themselves about Blaine's situation, others complain about being called just to receive such a bad news. Matt sighs, shaking his head. He knows that there's no point in trying to reason with Leo now that Cody is part of the plan. He can only hope for the best and try to keep the factory running smoothly.

Casey only gets up from his chair when everybody has left the room. “I know what you're trying to do,” he says accusingly.

Leo arches an eyebrow. “I don't know what you're talking about.”

Casey gets closer. He shouldn't be tall enough to look threatening, but his slightly crazy expression does the trick nonetheless. “My brother is now your responsibility,” he says, frowning, “which means that if something happens to him, I'm gonna break your legs. For a start.”

He doesn't give Leo the time to answer and leaves the room.  
His words, scary enough, hang in the air until the echo of his booted steps is gone.

*

The crash is so big that the whole house trembles.  
Adam is painting in his studio – that's how he presumptuously calls the garage, which his mother lets him use to paint, mostly because this way he doesn't risk to ruin anything in the house – and all his well aligned new canvas fall down from their shelves. His first thought is an earthquake, but there are no following shakes, which would be very unusual after a first one so big.

His second thought is that something exploded, and of course the only thing that could have exploded is the boiler. It's very old and it's been repaired many times. Maybe one too many and now it exploded. He drops the brush, that rolls on the floor and under a cabinet. He runs inside the house, without realizing that if the boiler had actually exploded, probably there wouldn't be a house to run inside anymore. In fact, the boiler is right where he left it last time that he checked it, in the basement, next to the washing machine that scared him to death when he was a kid. The boiler looks ancient, but all in all okay.

Adam frowns. It makes no sense, he did hear the crash. He inspects the whole house, but everything seems in order, so he goes outside, and that's when he finally sees it. His and his mother's house used to be an old farm. His grandfather – his dad's father – left it to his son before moving to warmer Florida, but Adam's dad died before he had the time to make any renovation, so the house still looks like a farm without being one and it still has a barn. Said barn has now a hole in his roof that absolutely wasn't there ten minutes ago.

Adam runs inside, wondering if it might be a piece of some space probe. Those things are falling more and more often nowadays. Or maybe the engine of a plane. The man who owns the coffee shop in town says that in 2001 one of those engines crashed through the roof of a house and into the room of a teenage boy, who should have died but was miraculously out of the house at that moment. It sounds suspiciously too similar to the plot of an old movie, but it can't hurt to check.

What fell from the sky is definitely not a probe or plane engine – Adam has seen photos of those and they look nothing like that – but he honestly doesn't know what the hell it is. He approaches it carefully, mainly because, falling, it destroyed a big portion of the upper level and Adam's not sure the rest won't fall too, but also because it could be anything and you can never be too sure.

The thing is the size of a pick-up truck and it looks a bit like a giant white egg. The tinted window on the frontal part makes him think that it might be some kind of vehicle. A space shuttle, maybe? From what he can see, the thing is lying on one side, not exactly under the hole in the roof. “So maybe it crashed, fell and they tried to stir it,” he reasons aloud. Then he realizes that whoever did that might still be inside. And they might not be friendly.

He stops a few feet from the thing. He tries to decide if he believes in aliens enough to be scared of being in the presence of a spaceship. Truth is, he doesn't deny the presence of other sentient creatures in the universe, but they wouldn't travel in something so small and they would definitely not crash into his barn. So, no aliens. It could be some foreign aircraft. He has never seen anything like that, but it could still be a prototype. Still, what would a foreign prototype aircraft do over Lima, Ohio? It doesn't make much sense.

Anyway, if it is some kind of aircraft, someone was driving it, and if they are still alive, they have to come out sooner or later. So, he decides to wait. He sits down a few feet from the thing and stares at it carefully for at least twenty minutes, but nothing happens. He sighs, waits some more, but still nothing. That is when he decides that he'd rather be captured by aliens or foreign military than stare at this thing one minute longer. 

He walks around the big egg looking for a door, but it doesn't seem to have one. There's a little joint on the front, tho, just below the window, like those on a dog sled. In fact, there are harnesses too, all tangled on the ground. “A sleigh?” Adam asks aloud. “How can it possibly be a sleigh? Sleighs don't fly!”

“We have at least fifty models in our garage that disprove your words.”

Adam turns around and all he sees is a blinding flash of light.  
Then he faints.

*

“Do you think he's dead?”

“I doubt we were so lucky.”

“Leo!”

“What? It's true.”

Sounds comes before images, and it's unintelligible buzz at first. Then he can make out two different voices, one sweet, caring for his well being – thank you, whoever you are, dear stranger – and another, warm but incredibly presumptuous, wishing he was dead – thank you for nothing, second stranger.

Adam's head is sore and his thoughts are so tangled that he gives up the idea of giving them sense. He will do what he does every Christmas when he takes the light out of the box. He puts them on the tree as they are, knots and all. He knows he's awake – he's pretty sure about that – but he cannot say if his eyes are closed or if he's blind. He blinks. They were closed. He can see the light.

“He's waking up!” This is Sweet-voice.

Finally, Adam manages to see what's in front of him, and what's in front of him makes very little sense. They are two boys, one tall and one small, both with black hair. They look human, obviously, but there's something wrong with their faces, just Adam doesn't know what it is yet. The tall one wears a pair of green cargo pants and a red and white striped hoodie over a white shirt. There's a dirty rag hanging from the back pocket of his pants, giving him the general look of a Christmas mechanic. The smaller one – Adam wonders if he's imagining him at all – looks like the sexy version of _elf on the shelf_ on a costumes site. He's wearing an all red outfit, but his shorts are barely covering his ass and his shirt, traditional white pointy collar and all, is so big that one of his shoulders pops out every time he moves. Only the hat remains pretty much the same, but comes down on his shoulder, framing a face that is at the same time very cute and very elvish in a non-Christmas, surely non-children-friendly face.

Adam groans as he rolls on his side and then sits up, looking around. He's still in his barn but the egg-thing is not lying on its side anymore. In fact, a door he hadn't known was there has been opened somehow. Inside he can glimpse a seat and part of a dashboard. “Did you hit me on the head?” Not the most clever thing to ask to someone who supposedly just assaulted you. But he'd rather keep the questions easy for the moment.

“I bewitched you,” says Presumption, the taller one, showing him something that looks a lot like a toy space gun.

“You what?”

“I didn't really mean to,” he continues, ignoring Adam's question. “It was an automatic reaction when you came out from behind the sleigh. You can say it's half your fault.”

“What?” Adam asks again, dumbfounded. “I was in my barn, you actually trespass, assault me and it is my fault?”

“He didn't mean that,” Sweet-voice says.

“I actually did mean that.”

Sweet-voice steps in front of him, but it's pointless because his friend is way taller than him and Adam can still see him glaring behind. “We didn't know you were in here. You surprised us and we both just pressed the trigger.”

“The trigger?”

“Of the Bewitcher,” Sweet-voice says, showing him another of those toy-looking space guns.  
It's red and rounded, with a white ball at the end of the barrel. It's vaguely shaped as a hairdryer and it's hardly bigger than his hand. “You see, this is not our field of expertise. We usually don't do things like these.”

Adam has no idea what he's talking about. What field of expertise would have you going in other people's barns dressed like that, holding a fancy hairdryer and knocking people out? Then he realizes what Presumption said a moment earlier. “Wait, do you know what this is?” He asks, pointing at the egg-thing.

Presumption looks pretty annoyed. Actually, he never stopped looking annoyed, so maybe that's the only expression he has. “Yes, I do.”

Adam scrambles to his feet, suddenly excited. “So? What is it?”

“I told you, it's a sleigh,” he answers, as he walks back to it. He left a few tools on the seat and now he starts to put them back in a little bag.

“This is not a sleigh,” Adam insists, joining him. Upon a closer inspection, the inside of the egg looks pretty much like the inside of a car, except it is clearly nothing like the inside of a car. It's a funny, not all pleasant feeling. The more he looks at it, the less sense it makes. For example, there's a seat, but his eyes perceive it as bigger than it should be possible for such a small space. And the dashboard doesn't have any of the normal gauges, but things that Adam has no idea what they measure. The symbols next to them are things like a snowflake, a present, a heart... but everything always disappears between blinks. “It fell in my barn through the roof.”

“So?”

“So, since sleighs can't fly, it must be something else.”

“Usually, they don't. But this one is special,” Leo says dismissively.

“What? It's a flying sleigh, now?” Adam says skeptically, crossing his arms on his chest. “Like Santa's?”

Presumption sighs and then rubs his eyes with his fingers, then he decides that he's been dramatic enough and turns around, staring into Adam's eyes with determination mixed to something Adam can only describe as endless tiredness. “This is not a sleigh _like_ Santa's. This _is_ Santa's sleigh.,” he says. “Well, one of the many at least.”

Adam doesn't know what kind of reaction the boy was expecting from him, but he starts laughing and he also feels pretty justified to do so. This must be an elaborate joke, so laughing seems the appropriate reaction. He even bends over, holding his stomach as he tries to hold back his tears and fails. For a moment it's just him laughing and no other sound. The other two just watch him, Presumption with pure hatred and Sweet-voice with a nervous expression.

“I'm bewitching him again,” Presumption says eventually, stepping forward. “No, I'm killing him.”

“You know you can't do that!” Sweet-voice steps in, placing both his hands against his chest to stop him. Then he turns to Adam. “I know it's a lot to take in, but you have to believe us.”

“Oh, come on, guys!” Adam laughs some more but then manages to get a grip of himself. “I don't know if you're people from the government who came here to cover up something we're not supposed to know, or if you're just two thieves who saw this thing coming through the room and came to see if there was something to steal, but you can't really expect me to believe this is Santa's sleigh. What would you be? His elves?”

“Yes!” Sweet-voice exclaims, raising both his arms in an excessive show of happiness.

And he looks so genuinely excited that Adam realizes he's serious. “You can't be serious,” he says, frowning. He's either facing two psychos or he never really woke up. 

“I am,” Sweet-voice says nodding, eagerly. “You must believe us because we cannot lie. We're good magical creatures, it's part of the deal. We cannot lie or do bad things.”

Adam frowns. “He was about to kill me,” he points out.

“Oh, he wasn't gonna do that,” Sweet-voice says, “because he can't. We're physically unable to kill.”

“What's with the guns, then?” Adam insists. “You knocked me out and wondered if I was dead. I heard you.”

Sweet-voice looks very guilty all of a sudden. His big blue eyes turn glassy. “Oh, I'm really sorry about that!” He says, covering his mouth with both his hands. “It was an accident, really. Bewitchers are not for killing, we use them with children.”

“You use guns on children?!” Adam screams in shock.

“Yes! No! I mean... Leo, tell him!” The so called elf says, in panic.

So Presumption has a name. He sighs. “These,” he says, showing Adam the gun, “are not guns. They erase memory, nothing more. They're always on low setting, but we both shot at you. You've been shot twice, that's why you passed out. But they are harmless. We use them on children when they happen to see us. They are the only ones who can, so of course we had to find a non-killing way to defend ourselves.”

Adam frowns and then smirks. “How come I can see you, then?” He asks, smugly.

“Maybe it's because you're childish. I don't know.”

“Maybe it's because you're not elves,” Adam says triumphantly.

Leo massages his temples. “We don't have time for this,” he says to his friend, possibly hoping in his pointless permission to do those bad things he cannot do. Then he sighs, the same way Adam's mother sighs when her nerves are wearing thin, but she knows she can't kill her only son. “Fine. Would it help and, most importantly, would it speed up the process of you accepting our existence, if I proved to you that I've known you since the day you were able to form your first coherent Christmas wish?”

“Oh please, be my guest,” Adam invites him with a gesture. There's no way this guy know anything about him.

Sweet-voice – Adam really wishes he knew his name too – looks at Leo with concern and steps a little closer to him. “You're Adam Walker, you are seventeen and you like sports and painting,” Leo says.

“That's all?” Adam doesn't seem impressed. “Anybody can gather that from my Facebook page.”

Leo doesn't change expression. He's looking straight at him, his eyes are a darker shade of blue than his friend and they look fierce and somewhat ancient. “You sent us your first handwritten letter when you were three years and half,” he continues. “Your mother helped you out with some of the spelling, but the writing was all yours. You used an orange crayon and you asked for dinosaurs. We brought you a whole set of herbivores and a T-Rex that made you very happy and sent our satisfaction-o-meter to the roof.”

Adam knows that he should be laughing at the word _satisfaction-o-meter_ , especially because Leo had a very stern face when he said that, but he can't. There's something that makes him uncomfortable in the way Leo's rattling off facts of his life like they were of public domain where he comes from. He's a great actor, he must give him that. “Every three-year old wants dinosaurs and I can't possibly remember the color of the crayon I used,” he says. “Are you even trying?”

Sweet-voice gets even closer to Leo, in a protective way. “Leo, it's okay,” he says tentatively. “He doesn't really have to believe us. We could just...”

“Oh, but I want to believe,” Adam snorts. “Please, make me believe.”

“Your presents the year after were your very first football, your first set of real canvas and paint, and a stuffed flamingo you had been obsessing over for the past six months,” Leo goes on.

“Listen, you know I love sports and I paint, it's only logical that someone gave me a football and paint at some point in my life,” Adam insists. “And I told you before, I can't remember details of my Christmas when I was so young. Why don't you try with a Christmas when I was a little older, seven or eight, maybe.”

Sweet-voice holds Leo's hand and whispers _Don't_ , but Leo goes on. “From when you were five to when you were ten, the only thing you would ask for was your father's return. In the letters you sent us you would explain why you and your mother needed him, and that you were ready to trade every future present for him. After five years, when we couldn't grant your wish, you stopped believing in Santa, and that was the last time we heard from you.”

Adam remains silent for the longest time, his eyes staring at nothing. Sweet-voice steps forward, but Adam raises his hand to stop him, gently. He needs a moment, maybe two. “How could you possibly know all this?” He asks. He's not really angry. He's sad, as if the weight of his father's absence, that he's been dealing with for the past ten years, had come crashing down on his shoulders. It's because those words didn't summon the pain he feels now – an adult sorrow he came to terms with – but the pain he felt then, when he was just a kid, and it was this monstrous, overwhelming thing that made hard even breathing. “I never gave my mom those letters so she could send them _to the North Pole_. I thought she could read them and I didn't want her to be sad, so I would send them by myself.”

Leo's face mellows a bit. “I could explain to you how it works, but you wouldn't--”

“Try,” Adam snaps.

Leo sighs. “Alright. We have a special tracker. When a kid is born, our factory is alerted and a special bond is created. You can imagine it like an invisible magic thread between the kid and us. It's not really magic and it's not really a thread, but it'll give you an idea. As the kid grows older, that thread grows too with the strength of his dreams and wishes. Our factory feeds on those. When he starts writing his letters to Santa, he puts his dreams in them, we sense it and we can retrieve a copy of those letters to know what to bring to him. That's how we know what moms and dads know to buy. In those letters about your father you were really hoping and really believing. It was a wish in the purest form. It was you. That's how those letters came to us no matter where you sent them.”

Adam doesn't know why, but he thinks Leo is telling the truth, as impossible as it might sound. He is not one of those people who take pride in saying that he can detect a lie. He can't. Sometimes people lie to him and he doesn't know until later. But this is different. He can _feel_ the truth of Leo's words. It's a feeling he can't put into words. “And you couldn't do anything,” he says, tentatively. If you're ready to believe in the existence of Santa's elves, you can also start to think that somewhere, somehow, someone could resuscitate your father.

“It's not what we do, Adam,” Leo says, apologetically.

Adam sighs, nodding. “You make toys and candies.”

“I understand it must sound quite pointless to you,” Leo says, with sympathy. 

“Oh no!” Adam looks up for the first time in the past ten minutes and gives them a little smile. It's still veiled with sadness, but it's still beautiful to see. “Actually, it's a great thing. I mean, knowing that you people really exist! That's exciting.”

“Is it?” Leo arches an eyebrow, unsure about what's happening here.

“Yes! It's great news! I mean, it's a true Christmas miracle, right?” Adam thinks that there's no point in being sad for something that happened so long ago, for which none of the people present has any fault. As his mother always says, if you see rain even when it's sunny, you'll end up wet anyway. And he's not gonna ignore the big, incredible sun right in front of him. “Even tho, Christmas is in a week.”

“About that,” Leo coughs, scratching his head, “we might have a problem.”

*

“To whom it may concern, but I think it's gonna be Leo... hi, love. I'm alive, mostly uninjured, possibly a little confused. So, quick report. The sleigh worked pretty much okay up to Michigan, then the engine started grumbling and spitting, there were lights on and off all over the dashboard and... oh! And I smelled cinnamon. Does it help? Anyway, at some point everything stopped working and the sleigh just dropped like a stone. I think I made a hole in somebody's roof. Let's bring them something to make up for it. The sleigh is okay. I mean, it doesn't turn on anymore, but there are no dents, not even the glass broke, you were right about replacing it with that new thing you stressed me about for ages, what was it? Never mind. It worked, anyway. All in all, my clothes suffered the most damage, I'm afraid. And I lost my hat. I loved that hat. I think I'm in Ohio. The digital map doesn't work anymore, but I think Ohio is the last thing I saw before it died. But if you're listening to this, you know that already. Now, I know you're mad at me because I didn't listen to you and I went behind your back with this test flight, and I'm gonna make it up to you. I promise. Don't get angry at Matt. It's not his fault. I sort of forced him into help me, he doesn't deserve your wrath, my love. Cody, I know you're there, pet, Leo doesn't go anywhere without you anymore, please, keep him calm as you always do. Now, I have to go find a place to hide and wait for you two. This... barn, I think, I don't know, it's too exposed. I have to leave the sleigh here, but I'm hiding the reindeer. Be safe. Be quick. Love you.”

The recording ends with a lot of fizzing and buzzing, and a lot of silly cursing. Adam didn't know someone could sound so angry screaming _Oh, for the love of candy canes!_. Apparently, while Adam was passed out on the floor, Leo had managed to open the sleigh and, fumbling with what's still working of its electronics, retrieved a message Santa has recorded before fleeing the place.

“So,” Adam clears his throat, not knowing what to say exactly. This is not how he imagined a message from Santa. “He sounds... younger than I expected.”

“It's many other things you don't expect,” Leo comments.

He's annoyed. At Blaine, mostly, but that's no news. The man always does whatever he wants, which would be in his job description – he's a super magical being with great powers – excepts that what he wants to do is almost always something that can potentially injure him, so he can't be allowed that. 

“So, he basically grabbed a sleigh and ran?” Adam asks.

“He didn't run, he was doing a test flight,” Leo explains. “We usually do a couple of them before Christmas Eve. You know, to be sure. But he wasn't supposed to take this sleigh.”

“But if he knew you were coming, why leaving? He didn't even leave a clue to where he's going, how are you supposed to find him now?” Adam asks. He knows something about tactics and this doesn't look like one. You'd think Santa knows what he's about.

“He can't be too far and I can sense him whenever I'm near him,” Leo explains. “We're gonna need a car.”

“I can help you with that,” Adam offers. “I can drive you around in my mom's car.”

They cover the sleigh with an old blanket in case someone walks in. Neither Adam or his mother has ever done that in two years (and Mrs. Walker is at work right now), but you never know. The only time you're not careful is the one you end in trouble. Adam's mom has got a family car, not even a fancy one, but the two elves seem pretty excited about it. Even Leo, who up to now seemed bored by life itself. He sits in the front seat, while Cody climbs up in the back.

“It's so tiny inside too!” He exclaims, like this is a compliment.

Adam looks at him through the rear mirror. “Thanks... I guess?” He says, amused. 

Cody looks up, those big blue eyes shining. “Sorry,” he chuckles, embarrassed. “It's just that we don't have cars. And I've only been on our sleighs which work differently.”

“You don't come here often, eh?”

“This is my first time,” Cody nods. “But I passed the exam to be a helper, like Leo, so maybe I can come here more often.”

Adam drives confidently out of the driveway and into the street. It's been snowing in the past few weeks, but not enough to be dangerous. There is just the right amount of snow alongside the road, enough to make the endless fields look like whipped cream. “So, you're not all helpers like they said.”

“Oh jeez, no,” Leo scoffs, fumbling with the seat belt. He knows what it is, of course, but it's a primitive model that requires him to fasten it. “It would be mayhem. No, the number of Helpers, as in the elves who goes with him delivering presents, is very low. In fact, it's currently just one. Me. It will be two with Cody, this year. If we ever manage to find him, that is.”

“But you're not the only elves, right?” Adam keeps asking. “I mean, I thought he had a factory with hundreds of elves working for him.”

“It's not exactly like that,” Cody explains, catching Adam's eyes in the rear mirror again. “There are several of us in the estate, and we manage the Departments, but we have technicians producing everything.”

“Technicians?”

“Manual labor,” Leo specifies. “You would call them pixies. No, you would call them elves too, because you call _elf_ anything that has pointy ears.”

His pointy ears twitch nervously, making Adam realize what he has been missing so far. It's not their faces that are strange, it's the fact that they have pointy ears. He chuckles, but he doesn't comment on them. Somehow he feels it wouldn't be polite. “We got a lot of things wrong,” he says instead. “But something must be true, right? The reindeer, for example. He mentioned them.”

“Well, you can't fly a sleigh without them.”

“And the names? Are they true? Dasher, Dancer, Prancer, Vixen, Comet, Cupid, Donner and....” Adam seems to struggle with the last name.

“Blitzen,” Cody helps him out, chuckling. 

“Blitzen, right.” Adam smiles at him and enjoys seeing him blushing. “I always forget her name.”  
“It's a boy,” Leo frowns at him. Whatever it's going on between those two, he doesn't like it. “They all are. We can't use females, too small. By the way, those are not really their names. They're more, like, titles. Reindeer are not magical creatures, so they tend to, you know, get old or die, and we have to replace them periodically. But not all the reindeer are fit to ride in the front of the line or in the back or even in the middle. Each of them has his attitude. We name them accordingly to their place in the line, so we always know where to place them.”

“Oh.” Adam sounds disappointed. “So, Rudolph too...”

Leo groans. “No, bloody Rudolph is a magical reindeer,” he spits out, vexed. “He fell in one of the production tanks a gazillion years ago. He turned immortal, his stupid nose started glowing and... _Santa_ thought it was hilarious, so he started using him as a fog light.”

Adam chuckles. “You don't seem to like him.”

“He's unaesthetic. And he's an idiot,” Leo grumbles.

“The feeling is mutual,” Cody says. Then, he gets closer to Adam and whispers in his ear, loud enough for Leo to hear him perfectly. “Rudolph bit him once, that's why Leo hates him.”

They both start laughing and Leo glares at them. “Would you mind?” He growls. “Cody, you should sit down.”  
Cody obeys, but he keeps laughing a little.

When their bout of laughs die, they have reached the town, which is no more than a handful of houses put closer together by two crossing streets. “What are you gonna do when you find him?” Adam asks, slowing down as they check every passer-by and every window of every shop.

“I'm gonna try to repair the sleigh,” Leo answers, glaring back to a man who, apparently, finds his outfit worth staring at. Usually, adults don't see them. It's not hard to hide from them. Since they don't believe in Santa or his elves, their brain doesn't compute their images. Basically, they look at them and they see something else – whatever they want to see, really. Elves don't have to do anything, it's people's brain who does the job, by suggesting other suitable images. Elvish glamour works in reverse, they have to _force_ adults to see them, which is what Leo is doing now (everything minus the pointy ears, that is), because he figured out it would be weird for everybody to see Adam talking by himself. Instead, with kids nothing works. They see exactly what's in front of them, and elves can't convince them to see anything else.

“Is it bad? The damage, I mean.”

Leo takes his time to answer, evaluating the condition of the sleigh back in the barn. Or possibly looking at an awesome young lady checking out a bin full of used books outside of a bookshop. “It depends,” he says eventually. “Some parts are just disconnected, and I think I can fix those that are broken, but sleighs are whimsical hybrids. Sometimes repairing the mechanical parts is not enough when the magic doesn't wanna work.”

“It seems like a lot of trouble,” Adam comments. “All your machinery is half mechanical half magic?”

“Pretty much.”

“So, how do you get anything done if magic doesn't what it wants?”

“With a lot of patience,” Cody sighs. “Sometimes you just call it a day and try again tomorrow.”

Adam can't really imagine how they manage to keep up with everything this way, maybe that's what magic is all about: nothing makes sense but everything works in the end. “Couldn't you just come here with another sleigh, grab him and destroy the other?”

“Oh, that would have been nice,” Leo says, quickly glancing over, “if we lived in Fairyland.”

“But--”

“Which we don't, Adam!” Leo snaps. “Fairyland doesn't exist.”

“How come you people exist and faeries don't?!”

Leo frowns. “I didn't say faeries don't exist. We are bloody faeries!” Leo replies, raising his voice. “But Fairyland is a place invented by someone with too much imagination. Anyway, we couldn't come out here with another sleigh because only Santa can drive them. Think of it like a fingerprint recognition system, even though, of course, it's not exactly like that. And we're running out of time for that too, Santa needs to be himself to use it.”

Adam frowns, daring just a quick look at him before turning right, at the supermarket. Christmas is a week away, but it's already hell in there. “What do you mean _himself_? Who else could he be?”

“There's a reason why he delivers the presents during just one night,” Leo explains. “The more time he spends away from his estate, the less he remembers about it or himself. It's his curse.”

“Your world seems a lot complicated to be an eternal Winter Wonderland.”

“You have no idea,” Leo says. And then something makes him shiver violently. His whole body shakes visibly for just one second. “Stop the car.”

“What?”

“Stop the car,” Leo says again. “He's here.”  
He's out of the car before it comes to a complete stop.

“Hey! Wait!” Adam calls, but there's nobody there listening to him anymore, since Cody instantly threw himself out of the car behind Leo. Adam sees them both run inside a bar. He sighs, parking the car. This day has been crazy so far, and it doesn't seem that it's gonna go any better.

*

The bar is full to be morning.  
Maybe it's because the Holidays make a lot of people sad and they come here to drink their sorrow away. Or maybe it's the man in the red outfit at the karaoke mike, singing a jazz version of Jingle Bells and changing almost all the words.

“I remembered it differently,” Adam comments, looking at the tall, black-haired man singing his heart out for a group of amused people, who clearly came in to see the drunk man perform.

“We need to get him off there before he makes a fool of himself,” Leo says.

“It seems late for that,” Adam says, pitifully.

“Oh, you weren't at our Christmas party last year,” Cody sighs, remembering that night with resignation and a little pinch of embarrassment. 

Adam frowns. “Wait, are you saying that man is Santa?” He asks, going back to look at the stage.  
“We told you he was very different from the image you had in mind,” Cody says, following Leo among the crowd. Nobody makes room for them, so Leo is forced to push people right and left.

“Yes! Different! I thought you meant his character! Or his attitude! But he doesn't have one of his traditional characteristics! Not even one!” Adam screams back, following the two elves. This man looks about forty. He's got black, curly hair and no beard. He's definitely fit and he wears something red, yes, but that doesn't even remotely resembles Santa's outfit. He looks like he just came out from a fashion magazine. This man is the farthest thing from Santa Adam has ever seen. 

“Yes, well, it's a marketing thing,” Cody tries to explain, as he gets pushed and pull by the crowd that tends to close in on itself the moment Leo has elbowed his way through it. “You know, he's supposed to deliver presents to the kids. He has to have a reassuring image. A jolly grandfather more than...”

“A sexy stripper?” Adam says, sarcastically. “No shit!”

“Blaine!” Leo roars, when the man seems to be about to take off his shirt. Not only him, but the whole crowd turns to look at them.

“Blaine?” Adam asks. The crowd has stopped moving and it's too shock by Leo's booming voice to make resistance, so it's very easy to move now. So easy that Adam crashes into Cody, almost knocking him over.

“It's his name,” Cody says, finally reaching the foot of the stage.

“Are you kidding me?” Adam is so beyond shocked now that he doesn't even care if people hear him squeaking like an eagle. “Not even his name is true! That man is a fraud!”

Blaine smiles at Leo, who's climbing up the steps of the stage. “A fan!” He exclaims delighted to the crowd, now watching the scene intrigued. Suddenly there might be the chance that this is not the impromptu performance of a drunk man, but a real show. “Come to me, young man! Don't be shy!”

Leo is a lot of things, but he's definitely not shy as he grabs Blaine by his wrist and brings him down the stage unceremoniously. There's a limit to his patience, and Blaine clearly passed it several months ago. 

“Oh, so fierce!” Blaine comments, absolutely unfazed by this extraction. He doesn't seem quite aware that he's being extracted from everywhere. “Such passion! Oh! I wish I knew you, young man!”

“Unfortunately for me, you do,” Leo mutters, dragging him along. They move in reverse through the crowd and towards the door of the bar. Adam is leading the way, now.

“Do I?” Blaine chirps. He seems happy to be given such news. They never know how much time it'll take for him to lose his memory. Apparently, this time took very little.

“Yes, you do,” Leo says, patiently. 

Blaine's innocent, surprise expression turns into a devious smirk. “How well do I know you?” He asks, passing an arm around his shoulders.

Leo sighs as he they get out of the bar. “Pretty well,” he answers, and then inhales the chilly winter air, showing him what to do. “Come on, breath in.”

But Blaine doesn't seem interested in breathing some fresh air. His eyes are locked on Leo, and he looks really interested in what he's looking at. Cody opens the door of the car for them and Leo pushes Blaine inside, despite the man's resistance. “Did we sleep together?” He smirks, smugly.

Leo sends Cody to sit in the front seat with a nod, and climbs in the back with Blaine. “Several times,” he answers with a resigned sigh, “which I now regret deeply.”

“And here it goes my childhood!” Adam sighs.

“Can you just drive us back to the barn?!” Leo snaps, as he tries to keep Blaine from slipping his hands under his shirt. “I would really appreciate it.”

“This is unbelievable. It's beyond awkward. It's disturbing!” Adam continues, starting the engine. “When this is over, I want my memory wiped. I want my innocence back.”

They set off and Blaine seems to calm down. He contents himself to rest his head in Leo's lap, and two turns later he's asleep.

*

Sleeping does the trick, because when they reach the barn, Blaine is calmer and more willing to listen than dancing around. He's still confused, a little sore and his head aches – he's basically hangover – but at least he's aware he lost his memory and a considerable amount of his time which is unaccounted for. Leo makes him sit on an old couch that is there waiting to be thrown away and sends Cody to make some eggnog for everybody. Adam has never tasted eggnog in his life, but he doesn't dare to say anything since Leo turned suddenly so assertive. Even Cody runs to obey.

Being close to his elves and his sleigh helps Blaine a lot. Not only he remembers his name and the fact that he's not from here, but he recognizes Leo. And the sudden intimacy between those two – the way Leo plays with his fingers, the way Blaine looks at him like he can't see anything else – makes Adam a little uncomfortable. Mainly because he can't even wrap is mind around the fact that Blaine is Santa, so he's having problems dealing with the fact that he seems to be too close to one of his elves 

Luckily for him, his lifesaver – in the pretty form of Cody – comes back ten minutes later with a tray Adam didn't know was in the house and four of his mother's Christmas mugs. “You actually make it,” Adam comments, blinking. “I thought you could just summon it out of thin air or something.”

Cody chuckles. “That is not how magic works,” he says, offering him his mug, before moving towards the couch. “Here you go, Blaine.”

“Thanks, pet,” Blaine answers. Both Cody and Leo smiles warmly at the same time. Even Blaine realizes he said something very specific. And like beads on a thread, one thought follows the other. “He's Cody, right?” He asks.

Leo nods. “Yes he is,” he confirms, and then sits down on the couch with his mug, half leaning on him. “What else you remember?”

“That you're jealous,” Blaine says, smirking to him. “And you always touch me when you think I got distracted from you. Am I right?”

“You're getting there,” Leo smirks back. He rubs his nose against Blaine's, somehow tentatively, inviting a kiss. Blaine seems to hesitate just for a moment and then his eyes turn even more aware and he kisses him. Leo's presence is bringing him back from whatever place he was.

Adam turns away with a sigh, and decides to drawn his sorrow for his lost childhood in his eggnog, which he didn't know he needed in his life until now. “I suppose a Mrs. Claus is not even in the realm of possibilities,” he says, but he makes it a question in the event that something about this man is what he thought it was.

“I'm afraid not,” Cody chuckles.

“I thought so,” Adam says, resigned. “Honestly, I thought Santa's elves couldn't be gay, let alone Santa.”

“Why not?” Cody asks. He licks cream from his upper lip and for a moment Adam can't really see anything else. It's like on television. Close up of Cody's lips. Tongue in slow motion. Ambient noise turning into faint, sweet music. He almost expects to hear the sound of a record scratching as Cody repeats his name over and over, but nothing of the sort happens.

“Well,” he says, slowly trying to regain is composure, “because I didn't even know they could be attracted to other people like that. I mean, I didn't even know they could be straight or anything. You are elves, you make presents, you deliver them, you occasionally enjoy milk and cookies, and that's it.”

“Now, if I wasn't a creature of love and good feelings, I would be very offended at your reductive idea of what we are.” Cody chuckles to show him he's actually amused. “Managing the Christmas factory is not exactly _just a job_ , but we have free time and we have hobbies. We are people like you. So it's only natural that we also love others sometimes. And since for us love is love, we learned what homophobia was from you.”

“What a big contribution to the world.”

“Don't beat yourself up, for every stupid human being there are hundreds of smart ones,” Cody smiles, lighting up the room. “And I know all their names, so you can trust me.”

Adam nods. “So, how long have they been a thing?”  
If he has to live in this kind of world, he can very well talk about it.

“Since forever,” Cody nods. “Leo has been there with him since the beginning. Well, not exactly since the beginning but almost. Someone left him outside the factory when he was a kid, so Blaine took him with him.”

“So he raised him,” Adam makes a face.

“Don't say it like that thinking what you're thinking,” Cody smiles. “Blaine was his role model, but he has never been a father.”

“And that's because I like children only when they belong to someone else and my only duty is to bring them what they want one night a year,” Blaine says, suddenly appearing next to Adam, who almost falls off his chair. Blaine looks himself now – or at least he doesn't look like someone who has no idea of where and why he is where he is. In fact, he leans over the table and kisses Cody on his lips too. “I have never in my long long life considered my two boys my kids, even though they get some spanking sometimes. Right, boys?  
Both Leo and Cody laughs.

“Oh my God, shut up!” Adam whines, loudly. “I preferred you when you didn't remember anything.”

“I'm much more fun this way,” Blaine says, munching on a cookie. “Now, report.”

Leo drags himself off the couch and fixes his rumpled clothes. “Engine is pretty much okay. Just a few loose pipes,” he says. “The electronics needs to be rewired and the GPS reprogrammed. The new apps conflicted with the old OS, the computer overclocked and burned a few circuits.”

Blaine gives him a look of affection and pride, but he laughs. “I have absolutely no idea of what you're talking about, kiddo.”

Leo sighs. “The computer is fried.”

“Can you un-fry it?”

“I think so,” Leo nods. “With a little time.”

“We don't have much,” Blaine says. “Anything else?”

“That is the biggest damage. Then, one of the skate is broken,” Leo continues. “And you need to refill the tanks.”

Blaine doesn't panic as Adam would expect. He doesn't even look worried, though probably he is. He just nods seriously. “Another all-nighter?”

Leo and Cody sigh in unison. “Another all-nighter.”

*

The sleight has been turned upside down, so Blaine could take care of the skate.  
They don't have another skate to replace the one that's broken, of course, but it only needs to be fixed enough to hold twice, when the sleigh takes off and when it lands. So, Blaine is cutting an old broomstick the right size, and he's planning to tie it to the broken skate with tape and rope. Not the safest or the prettiest of fixing ups, but they have bigger problems to take care of.

As, for example, the computer. Leo had to take off the cover of the dashboard and extract the computer, which is like nothing Adam has ever seen. It's more or less the size of an apple, and completely touch. Leo holds it in both hands, like you would do with a portable console, and he's been pressing on different parts of it for the past two hours. Every time he presses in a certain point, a little square flashes up, as if the buttons were invisible and only lighted up when you touch them. There's no display, but whenever he inserts a line of command – or at least Adam thinks that's what he does – a little hologram appears with what looks like the result. All in all, it seems all obscure and complicated, despite the fact that Leo is working on it lying on the ground, legs swinging, as he were playing video games instead.

Cody is connecting the pipes of the engines that came lose and he's bended over the engine compartment, which makes hard for everybody not to look at his ass. He's got a piece of paper on which Leo drew a scheme for him, since engines are not his thing, and he's the most cheerful of the trio. “It's like being in the factory again, isn't it?” He says, and stop humming for a minute. “Working the night away.”

“Speaking of which,” Leo stops typing on his apple-computer, who seems to protest with a couple of beeps, and rubs his eyes. “Do we have some candies?”

Cody's baby blue eyes pop up from under the sleigh's hood. “I've got something,” he says. He cleans his hands on a rug, like a real mechanic, and rummages inside a little bag he wears to his hip, then he smiles showing Leo a few rounded pills on the palm of his hand. “Here.”

Leo shakes his head, showing the computer. “I've got my hands full.” Adam, who's got nothing to do – they didn't let him do anything – is watching the scene wondering what exactly is going on right in front of his eyes. Cody offers to feed Leo one pill, but he shakes his head again, smirking. So, Cody puts one in his mouth and passes it to it with a kiss.

That's when Adam gets it. “Are you doing drugs now?!” He cries out in shock, as Cody gives one to Blaine too in the same so totally not elvish way.

“How did you think we pull off delivering more than two billions presents in one night?” Leo asks.

“I don't know! Coffee, like everybody else who's got to work all night?” Adam replies, hysterically.

Leo shrugs. “Coffee makes fairies suicidal,” he explains. “It'd be pointless to drink something to boost productivity, but halve the population of the whole factory in two hours. I mean, if we had technician to spare but...”

“Leo!” Both Cody and Blaine says in unison.

Adam can't believe is ears. “Is this the example you want to give to the kids?” He scolds them. He stares at Blaine in particular, but he's totally unfazed by it.

“Well, we don't push drugs to the kids,” Leo frowns. “Not anymore, at least. And it's not chemical. It's all natural, so it's safe.”

“What happened to the good old stardust?”

“This is _the stardust_ ,” Cody shows him one of the pills. “It's the name.”

“I'm done!” Adam flails his arm. This is too much. Okay this weird Santa. Okay these weird elves. Okay the threesome, which is not his thing, but he's okay with whatever makes people happy. But drugs are too much. This was something he didn't want to know. “I'm done, seriously. I can't with you people. I'll leave you to it. Just... call me when you're done.”

The three of them watch him storm out of the room and slam the door closed. “He's always been a very emotional kid,” Blaine sighs, shaking his head.

*

Adam wakes up to find a handwritten note on the bed.

It was almost expecting them to be gone, but apparently they wanted to say goodbye. He's still a little upset about what he saw yesterday, but he's not mad at them anymore. So, when he shows up in the barn and he sees them all next to the sleigh, waiting for him, he feels a little sad to know they are about to go.

“Did you make it?” He asks.

“It took all night, but now it's good to go,” Leo smiles, patting the sleigh, who creaks a little. Adam arches an eyebrow. “It has seen better days, but it'll take us home.”

Adam nods, sadly. “So... you're going.”

“We kinda have to,” Leo says. “You know, with Christmas and everything.”

“And everything, yes.” Adam clears his throat, as the awkward silence sets in. “Is there any chance we're gonna see each other again?”

Blaine smiles. “You're not exactly on our route anymore,” he says. “But we're dropping by for sure. Plus, we owe you a new roof for the barn.”

“Right, and my childhood,” he jokes, except not so much. “Better make a list of the things you people own me.”

“I'm gonna check it twice.”

Leo rolls his eyes. “That was so lame, Blaine! So lame!” He shakes his head. “Get in the sleigh!”  
As Blaine enters his egg-like vehicle laughing, Cody and Leo get closer to say goodbye. Leo just waves – maybe a little awkwardly, sticking his hands in his pockets right after, but Cody throws himself in Adam's arms, hugging him tight.

“It was nice meeting you in person,” he whispers, leaving a kiss on his cheek. “And thank you for helping us.”

Leo smiles at the scene, but he grabs Cody's hand the moment he steps back. “We took the liberty of making your tree a little more... _festive_ , so to speak. Consider it a thank you for all your patient. Now, look over there.”

Adam looks, but there's nothing to see, and when he turns to ask Leo what was he supposed to see, they are gone. No sound, no magic beams. The barn is suddenly empty.  
He remains there for a little longer – aching somehow and sadder than he thought it would be – but then he manages to convince his brain that they are really gone, or maybe they were never really there to begin with.  
It's the tree – three times taller than it was two days ago – and the presents – now filling up the room – to convince him that either the elves were really on drugs or he is.  
Whatever the case, he'll have a lot of explaining to do.


End file.
